School Plan Credibility Questioned

Southwest Broward County will need another high school in the next 10 years, and several elementary schools with dwindling populations won't need $20 million in expansions after all.

Those are just some of the $90 million worth of changes being made to a 10-year school construction plan that was supposed to be a road map for growth but which School Board members say is so riddled with errors it has lost credibility.

"I'm not ready to write a check for this yet," snapped board member Judie Budnick, who thinks the survey's errors are so pervasive taxpayers shouldn't have to pay the $1.2 million cost.

"It's not what we thought; it's not what we bought," said board member Beverly Gallagher.

A new version of the plan is due to the School Board on April 29. It calls for an additional $50 million over last month's estimate of $2.1 billion in construction needs, said Tom Getz, district director of capital planning. The current version has come under fire for:

Recommending only moderate updates to some aging buildings, while advising that other relatively new ones be revamped or, in the case of Pines Middle, even demolished and rebuilt -- a move the state is blocking;

Including expensive extras at some schools, such as $250,000 in stage curtains for Plantation High's auditorium that just got new ones;

Leaving out a new $50 million high school for southwest Broward County that was in an earlier draft;

Recommending $20 million in construction for elementary schools built mostly in the 1990s. Although these schools are predicted to have limited or no growth, officials originally recommended their libraries, offices and other core areas be expanded. Some of the newer schools being scrutinized include Thurgood Marshall Elementary in Fort Lauderdale, Croissant Park in Fort Lauderdale, Lake Forest Elementary in Pembroke Park, Forest Hills in Coral Springs and Everglades Elementary in Weston.

The consultants have said the new version will include the new high school and cut the $20 million construction on the elementary schools with little growth. That cut, however, will be offset by $20 million in new classroom additions the consultants say are needed at other schools, Getz said.

The continued revisions are particularly troubling because, for the past year, officials had put off making numerous decisions on building and renovating schools, hoping the plan would show them the way.

"We still have a tool of huge value, but we need to cleanse it, verify it," said board member Lois Wexler.

Superintendent Frank Till, who says the document is still useful and was never intended to be the final word on district needs, says he plans to gather a team of principals over the summer to go over the document line by line to identify any additional mistakes. The principals will have about a month to do this and will receive no extra pay. Staff will visit campuses to verify needs if necessary, he added.

"I'm disappointed that I have to take this step to get credibility," Till said. "It's hard to say where we lost credibility."

Wexler says the answer lies, in part, in the formulaic approach the consultants took during the yearlong study.

The decision to replace a school was based in part on whether the cost of repairs and replacement over the next decade would be more than 60 percent of the cost to build a new school.

Getz says the firms simply did what the school district asked: create a software package in which massive amounts of data can be entered, and formulas applied, creating an assessment of schools' needs that can be constantly updated.

"The misconception was that this plan was going to answer all the questions ... make decisions and set priorities for the funding phase," he said.

Jamie Malernee can be reached at jmalernee@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4849.